Housekeeping and tidy up of an iMac - sanity check?

[Darren S]

Chaps,

Just wanted to run the following by you first. I'm fine doing this on PCs, but the Apple side is still a bit new to me!

First off, my sister-in-law has an i5 27" iMac. The local HDD is getting quite full and it comes with the preloaded version of OSX that it had when purchased - approx 3 years ago?

She has an external Time Capsule device that all her photos, music, etc gets backed up to.

I was thinking of getting the latest version of OSX bought and literally reformat the Mac to factory-fresh standard. Then simply pull across any relevant files from the Time Capsule box that she needs.

Am I being too 'PC minded' with this and going about it the wrong way? The iMac certainly seems to be struggling with a combination of lack of HDD space and various apps having been installed to it. I normally reformat my own PC every 5-6 months - but is this something that's not really relevant to an iMac?

Any suggestions or advice would be much appreciated. I even toyed with the idea of dropping the internal HDD and replacing it with a larger capacity device, then installing the latest version of OSX?

Cheers,
D.

 

[Vaughan]

Do a full time machine backup, make sure nothing has been excluded. Then do the disk format and is install. During the install you will be prompted to restore from a time machine backup. Easy.

To be honest, just install the latest version. No need to nuke everything.

 

[Tom]

Dont use the disk, use the new os. Its free. Probably better to wait a month for the latest OS

 

[MiseryStreak]

Wait for Yosemite, Mavericks is utter pants. Yosemite will probably be pants too though.

Partition the time capsule (or buy a 1TB external HDD for £40 and use that) and put the photos directly on that (if she's using iPhoto just change the save location to the external HDD) and back that up, she'll have so much free space on the iMac HDD she won't know what to do with it.

Stick some more RAM in it, Macs respond well to more RAM, once they start using virtual memory it's game over.

 

[Darren S]

Thanks for all the advice chaps - I'll definitely look into the memory upgrade.

I know on my ex's MacBook years back - it was a night & day difference between 2GB and upping it to 4GB.

Cheers,
D.